Call for bloggers!

The Locus collaborators are looking for people to submit blog entries about their experiences viewing the work.

We’re interested in whatever impressions, reactions, thoughts, dreams, and memories you might have, springing from being present as an audience member at Locus.

If you’re interested, please let us know by emailing locus.project@gmail.com. Please provide your full name, phone number, email address and let us know what night you plan to attend the performance. We’ll be excitedly reading responses we receive and posting excerpts online following each performance.

Locus postcard!

 

 

October 2-4, 2008 [Thu-Sat] 8pm

*post-performance discussion Sat Oct 4

Locus is a site-specific performance installation animating three distinct spaces with dance, music, scenery and video. Locus is viewed by an audience in motion…

Collaborators: 

Choreography/Performance: Brooke Belott, Lillian Cho, Katie Iacono, Tzveta Kassabova

Composer: Martin Gendelman

Musicians: Sally Sarles (viola), Stacey Mastrian (soprano)

Set Design: Sean Urbantke

Video: Dan Ribaudo

Costumes: Tzveta Kassabova

 

FREE PERFORMANCE

Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center

Department of Dance

www.claricesmithcenter.umd.edu

 

Set pieces…

Some set pieces in development.

Set pieces

Set pieces

The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges

Martin Gendelman, composer, contributed this short story by Jorge Luis Borges to the creative process for Locus. The full story can be read here: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jatill/175/CircularRuins.htm

From Wikipedia: “The Circular Ruins” (original Spanish title: “Las ruinas circulares”) is a fantasy short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Published in Sur in December 1940, it was included in the 1941 collection The Garden of Forking Paths (El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan) and then in part one of the 1944 collection Ficciones. It was first translated into English in New Directions 11(1949).

The short story deals with themes recurring in Borges’s work: idealism, the manifestation of thoughts in the “real world”, meaningful dreams, and immortality. The manifestation of thoughts as objects in the real world was a theme in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius but here Borges takes it to another level: the manifestation of human beings rather than simple objects.

The story also seems to symbolize writers as creators who engender one another and whose existence and originality would be impossible without their predecessors, a theme he wrote about in other works such as Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, another short story from the Ficciones collection.

Costumes in progress

Tzveta is creating the costumes for Locus. They are constructed from black fabric, but are then painted white, a process that reveals each fabric’s unique texture. These are some images of the costumes as they develop…

Costume detail

Costume detail

Costume detail

Lillian in costume

Lillian in costume

Lillian in costume

An early sketch of Locus

A sketch of Locus by video collaborator Dan Ribaudo

Project description

Locus is a site-specific dance work that animates three distinct spaces in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and engages the audience as a moving body along a circular pathway that connects these points.

In mathematics, a locus (Latin for “place”) is a collection of points which share a property. The spaces where the performance takes place – the choreography studio, the green room, and an adjoining hallway – are public or practical in nature, but have been transformed into visually compelling sites for movement installations that each audience member will view as a passerby on a constantly looping path.

By requiring each viewer to actively walk at a specified pace around and through the performance sites, Locus interrupts the viewer’s ability to disengage from the environment and heightens awareness of what is seen and what is missed.